Dell Pro Max 16 Plus laptop tested: sports NVIDIA RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell GPU, 128GB CAMM2 RAM

Dell's new Pro Max 16 laptop is in the wild, packing NVIDIA's new RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell GPU and 128GB of CAMM2 memory, check it out:

4

The folks over at Notebookcheck have gone hands-on with the new Dell Pro Max 16 laptop, putting it through its paces in a wide variety of benchmarks. The new Dell Pro Max 16 laptop is an interesting beast as it has the much more powerful RTX PRO 5000 GPU inside, alongside its 128GB of CAMM2 memory.

There's 24GB of GDDR7 memory on the RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell GPU, which Dell has installed through its DGF (Dell Graphics Form Factor) module, meaning that it is replaceable, allowing for direct GPU upgrades along the way. Notebookcheck's benchmarks show that in professional benchmarks, the NVIDIA RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell GPU is quite strong, comparing it to the flagship GeForce RTX 5090 GPU.

• Read more: Dell copies Apple's homework: new Dell Pro, Pro Premium, Pro Plus, Pro Max announced

Starting with 3DMark, the Dell Pro Max 16 laptop scored 98.3 points, matching the average for most Blackwell GPU-based laptops, and only behind the RTX 5090 Laptop GPU inside of the Alienware Area-51 m18 laptop. In productivity workloads, the Dell Pro Max 16 laptop scored 84.1 points, putting it around 16% behind the Alienware Area-51 m18 gaming laptop, but it beats every RTX 5000 Ada and RTX 4000 workstations that have been tested.

4

Notebookcheck also points out that the thermals and power design limit were tested to their limits, and while the RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell GPU has a 175W TDP, the Dell Pro Max 16 laptop stabilizes at around 125W under heavy workloads. The Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor sits at around 95-105C peak, with total system power hitting 280W under load.

We haven't seen any RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell GPUs tested yet, so this is an interesting look into how that GPU performs, and how well the 128GB of CAMM2 sits inside of the Dell Pro Max 16... which is still a really stupid naming choice, by the way... as I said when Dell announced it, the company really did copy Apple's homework.